[VL is Vinay Lal]

VL: Then you would surely disagree fundamentally with the continued attempts of most European and American historians to describe Nazism as an aberration within European history itself?

AN: The industrialized, scientized, technological violence Europe had tried outside Europe. In Europe, there was at most you could say trench warfare, but that was not self-conscious. Even in World War I, the killings in places like Flanders were not self-conscious exercises, as was Nazism; outside Europe it was often a self-conscious enterprise. Nazis, with Teutonic thoroughness, brought that experience to work within Europe; they applied to Europe what Europe had done outside Europe.